Oy am I tired. I stayed up late again last night jabbering on the telephone with another feller. I’ll save the perils of dating discussion for later in the post so those who tune in for monkeys and yarn can tune out before there. But first the really good news, Uncle Richie was able to get back into the house yesterday and rescued his animals. The dogs are at Bid-a-wee and can stay there for up to 15 days. Aunt Jackie will be driving back to pick them up and return them to Atlanta with her. The birds are in Metairie with friends. Not entirely sure where the cats are, but I suspect they are in Metairie as well. Dad doesn’t always think to ask the question. Heck we hadn’t a clue where and how my cousin’s husband was for days as dad never asked. I had wrongly assumed he’d stayed behind to watch the homestead, but found out that he’d gone with my aunt and cousin to Atlanta. Uncle R is going to be staying at a friend’s house in Metairie for the next bit as he works for the city in the building department and will probably be called back to work after the water is gone. His friends have a second house in Metairie and will be moving into one and letting him have the other. Nice to have friends like that! Anyway, its a relief that the two-legged and four-legged members of my family are now safe.
OFC (obligatory fiber content)
I knitted yesterday! I actually picked up Birchington again and managed to get two rounds done. At this rate, I’m going to be a grandma before that shawl is done. Scattering my attention every which way to Sunday isn’t helping in getting that thing done. In the interest of coming closer this decade, I’ve had a daily knitting realignment. Birchington is back in my bag, the socks are out. The amulet bag is hiding in the bag as well, especially since I wanted to take a picture of it. Plus them 0000 dpns could make a nice defensive weapon should I need one! We won’t talk about poor Eris hiding in the knitting bag, untouched and unloved for oh so very long now.
Here’s the beaded amulet bag that I’ve been working on. Sorry for the lousy photo. I have yet to have a chance to try out the new light tent. This was taken a few minutes ago on my lovely desktop at work. I did happen to use beads that come in a hank, rather than loose. My problem was as I was transfering them to the 10/2 tencel, the thread snapped, or disconnected, or once the tencel snapped and let go of the thread. Finally with the fourth strand, I got them all on without hearing little beads scatter. I love the color. Its fairly reminiscent of my pi shawl. Maybe mom would like this little bag to go with it. Fun to knit, still don’t know what I’m going to do with it. Looking at this picture, I think I need to pull the thread a little tighter after I slip the beads over.
Monkey Fun
Is it just me or can toddlers wreck havoc like a plague of locusts? I was on the phone with the office on Saturday (I was the lucky sucker on call this weekend) when the toddlers wrecked havoc on my bathroom, after visiting the pantry. They hit the toilet paper container for extra rolls, stuffing it with tissues from the box on the back of the toilet. The toilet paper roll was shredded by the aptly named Kat. Here you can see her on the floor with the pilferred container of almonds from the pantry. Luckily they didn’t recognize these things as food and contented themselves with scattering them all over the bathroom. There were nuts EVERYWHERE! Alex here has a handful that he was about to toss on the counter and into the sink. I did install safety latches on the pantry doors so there will be no repeat performance of canned goods touring the house. I do get to play the canned mystery game though as they did strip the labels off a few of them
This weekend was also pretty momentous in that the boy figured out that if he pushed his little wooden Ikea chair to the storm door, he could now reach the handle and let himself out. I’d gone to the car to get something, only to hear squealing and giggling as these two monkeys came around the side of the house heading for me. They’d escaped! He then spent a good deal of time pushing or carrying that chair everywhere and climbing on it for a new perspective of things. Lovely. Never ever a dull moment around.
Dating
Only on the dating scene for a couple of days and I already had to dispatch a nutcase. Here’s the quick timeline with this dude:
- Friday 9pm – Quick IM conversation where we exchange phone numbers (yup my 1st mistake)
- Sat 10:45pm – he calls, I ain’t answering as call intercept grabbed it and I was on my way to bed anyway. Short people get up early and all that.
- Sun 10:00am – he calls. This time I talked to him as I tried to simultaneously finish packing and feed the twins/cats/rabbit/myself breakfast. Convo got very strange and triggered some warning flags that had me deciding not to pursue a relationship. Told him I’d try and call him Monday night as we were going to be away. He told me I could call him from the boat (gosh thanks). Again, I repeat, I’ll try and call you Monday night. Dude wouldn’t shut up, finally got him off the phone so I could then wrangle the short people who once again had gotten into the bathroom, this time playing with a bar of soggy soap. Oy. Anyway, I ran through the conversation with my folks and again later with my sister and they all agree, no dating this guy. I decided to tell him thanks but no thanks.
- Mon 8:15pm – he calls. I was just finishing up with the twins’ bath/bedtime ritual and didn’t answer the phone. After I got done with them, I was on the phone with my mother, talking about the weekend, my uncle’s evacuation, visiting my sister this coming weekend, etc. After that, I popped on to check my email and wound up on the phone with a new fellow. We didn’t hang up until after midnight so I didn’t get back to the weirdo.
- Tues 8:05pm – he calls. Again, I’m getting the twins down to sleep and leave the phone to voice mail. Hell that’s what its there for isn’t it? He starts berating me for not getting back to him and blowing him off. How he would be a perfect match for me and how come I didn’t call him back, why didn’t I answer his IM last night, blah blah blah blah. Other than the finances thing (oh yeah, he’d told me I’d have to be the breadwinner – not bad in and of itself – but that also he needed a new job and maybe my dad could hook him up.. or maybe he could come to work at the same company I did – yeah, not a good picture) he would treat me like a queen.
- Tues 8:11pm – I call him back seething and got his voicemail. I told him off. I was away, he knew that. I have little kids. He knew that as well. It is in the first sentence of my profile on the service that I’m a single mom to almost 2 year old twins. I also told him to quit stalking me. I was only on the service briefly the previous night and never saw his IM. I said that while I was planning on calling and telling him nicely that I’d like to take a pass on pursuing any further relationship, he hadn’t given me the chance. I told him to lose my number and get lost.
- Tues 8:15pm – he calls back. First he apologized then disclaimed stalking me. Whatever. I told him again that while I wished him luck, I’m going to take a pass on pursuing a further relationship with him. He then went nuts telling me that while he thought we’d be a good match (because other than the kids, we had a similar situation with our divorces.. not even close doofus but I’ll spare you those ugly details), and that he was honest and a good guy unlike all the other losers on the service and was trying to spare me having to deal with all them. He was putting the burden on me to come to that decision and meet him saving myself the trouble of dating the phoneys. He kept going on and on and on and on. Couldn’t buy himself a clue that I was getting farther and farther from interested. "We can consider this our first fight" was a suggestion he made. "Sure and our last fight as well" was my reply. I finally got rid of him with a "Dude, buy a clue. I’m not interested." He finally hung up.
Geez, it almost makes me want to return to my self declared 6 month dating sabbatical that lasted from July 99 until now 😉 On the good side, I had a very lovely long conversation with a very nice guy after that. I had a really good time talking to him and he’s pencilled in for dinner either next Friday or the following week. Depends on both of our abilities to arrange for child care. I’m sure there will be more about him (B) or the fellow from the night before (J) who I’m going to have lunch with next week.
Bravo to anyone who reached this far, I do very much appreciate it. You all get good buddy merit points. I promise to continue shoving the dating fun into the end of a post and highlighting it so you can ignore at your leisure.
Knitting is indeed easier than dating!
Craft on.
